Tag Archives: Poem

The house was abandoned now. She recalled
her childhood, the memories dancing, empty,
through the hallways, caught up in the breathing
spiderwebs that draped the corners, the horizon
of the tiled bathroom floor was shrinking, fallen
through the trailer’s asbestos, a small void

where the animals buried themselves. A voided
utility bill with a bounced check, a stack of late fees fallen
on the bottom line, her lanterns were recalled
for trying to burn down a thrust of houses on the horizon.
Luckily they were never found again, empty.
The fires she left behind were still barely breathing

on the rooftops. Her ex-husband on the couch breathing
his favorite smoke, some brand of nihilism and a void
in his hands where he lost his zippo, an empty
gesture when she held her children, where her face had fallen.
She had to steal her own car while he slept, drove for the horizon
until she ran into her parent’s old house, if she recalled

correctly. She stood in the new dark, her past recalled
across the screen door of her eyelids. Her mother’s breathing
room–she needed to be left alone after a big fight–its horizon
lines pointed toward the red barn, the northern void
of her father’s face. She told her friends she had fallen
down a staircase, the bruises were blue and empty

enough to heal, but she wasn’t. Her mother was an empty
can of gas, a cut break line, a quivering voice that recalled
911 until they called her back, a telephone pole fallen
with a busted transformer. In that same house, breathing
the same blue-white electrical air, her own daughter’s void
clinging to her leg as she checked the broken window, the horizon

so far away she could run to it, her husband’s horizon
sent over the razor’s edge of the flat earth in her mirror’s empty
rear-view. She would not raise her children in a void.
It had been 30 years since she had been here, she recalled,
standing in the same living room, the wallpaper peeling with breath,
alive, molting the old skin of the past, the screaming fallen

with the old walls. Her daughter recalled a stark emptiness
from the corner, from before she was born, breathing on the horizon
of her memory, where the hand had fallen like a struck match through the void.

It was the way she preferred to appear,
a streak through a magnetic photograph,
here and gone before you knew what had really happened.
She vibrated in that flash, before you could say hello,
between two thoughts, her mouth, if you were lucky,
a buzzing mist of kisses. She was in so many places at once,
you keep meeting her, traveling with time
like her favorite book in her pocket, going back into it.

She leaves you notes in side dimensions
just in case you forgot your keys one more time,
forgot why you entered the room, what you were looking for,
open the refrigerator with the opposite hand
and it is hanging there, a shopping list for gravity.

As if the sun was too slow to warm you,
as if there were too much time between now and now,
she was there so suddenly moments didn’t even have a chance,
before you could remember the world without her, sooner than light.

You can’t step your toes into the rabbit hole. The wormhole chooses you, all or nothing. Enter the void and cross the veil, dive into it. It swallows you voraciously, you have no will, ego, consciousness left. The path of patterns break apart and you are left stranded. You must fall into it, merging into the mirror. All glimpses are illusion of material consciousness (shells breaking apart into linear time). Give it up (letgoletgo), surrender into the void. You will not recognize death until it swallows you. Mortality is your only gift, give it up. You need nothing. Living is bigger than you, space spirals into organic growth with root systems stretching their mathematical patterns beyond your realization. The master tunes into his will by bending reality into himself (bends himself to occupy being).

Glass trees, prismatic, nymphs dancing through shifting fractals, a network of coincidences collapsing into itself, in the grass blades, naked bodies moaning, convulsing, silent to the holographic worlds of the hermit stumbling drunkenly into the fool dancing to his hypnotic wisdom,the ignorance of innocence corrupted with discipline sinking into the cortex of my limbic system,channeling existence through the will of persistent imagination,cracking open patterns of automatic behavior and telepathic communication.

Another lazy day in the sun formulating the rotation of celestial bodies travelling through incessant determination. We are beautiful beings linked as the ego becomes aware of the preliminal systems, sharing an altered mindspace, intertwining ribcages of distorted, heart-racing empathy.

Can you see me with a broken antenna, spines bent in the storm, twist me until you receive the snowy signal? The feed is dim against the moonlight, your small chance to stare at the stars. The body warps until it feels itself floating in the transmission, can we find our way home on it, out of body and sinking into our own ways back. Your face shimmers into every person you’ve ever shown me. The storm bolts uprightin my bed, still trying to breathe underwater. What an insane fool I’ve been to believe myself for this long. I would apologize if it meant something. Sing to me and I’ll fall asleep, even if it means I’ll never see you again.

Travel through me like time,a desert landscape of moons rising over midnight wastelands,full of signs, correspondences, and hallucinations, coincidences and liquid interactions (alchemy, breathing the cancerous fumes of quicksilver and physics),

Out of gas and stranded, we still stumble into miracles in the kindness of strange people,head full of empty pockets of stories and a long road twisted into the future.

The siren song is finally deadly enough to listen to, lost on a ship, sailing into the fractured future. It unwinds time’s selfish clock. Waves of space wash into my face as we dance and we become an image of panoramic sunrise, virtually projecting itself onto the backs of our eyes like a hologram.

The green field tempts me, the light glimmering through the leaves onto supple, nubile bodies like an endless delusion, a prismatic charm of delight, hedonism, machinery. Enchanting lover, mesmerizing muse, serendipitous succubus, turn your whole inside out until i can sense you breaking free from the cage of your skin.

Your tongue burned a hole in my ribs the size of a key, your nimble fingers tumbling my chamber. Your mouth fills me with the sound of unlocking, bolt by bolt by bone I am opening. I am opening.

A drink in a sideshow carnival, a sex death wish, a list of inconsequential disasters. Fate emanates into kismet serendipity. Chaos answers to nothingness and order cracks open the flower of self to sink into nonsense. The pain is numbness and you can share with me, sedative, unconscious inconsistency, playing in the mirror against itself. The egg is a tomb of self-creation. We were born in death to live matter from the origin of motion.

I can feel my body casting shadows, the sun vibrating into my chest, shifting my heart into a cloudy web of laser beams. I am melting into the earth, curling up in her endless chambers, the cave of my mouth yawning into the sky, crumbling with dirt. My head is overflowing with birds diving into the blue green water of my hands, swimming into the waves. Space is expanding through me, stretching me, filling me with emptiness. Pour your kisses into me, tongue of light. Throw my shadows onto the ground, carry them into your bed until they sleep, burn them into gold, these elemental dreams.

If you need a crowbar to open your skull,
you probably weren’t yourself in the first place.
Sometimes it’s right to let a little light in. Your face
is a garden seeded with nail-flowers
and rosebush railroad spikes. The train
is pounding like a hammer with a mad god
dancing in the engine. There are roots in your palm
and an animal with a thousand changing faces
is eating from it slowly and staring up
at your new eye–its blasted visions
of dynamite–a metal taste in your mouth,
seafoam lips smooth as doll plastic,
the song of a revolver
screeching with needled records
grooved through your jaw, a purple smell
as you bend down to your knee, growing in place,
your head steeled with the blossom
of a blown-out dandelion, a new man.

The temple burned in silence, memories of the dead
blown across the flat desert. Mourners gathered
one last time as the wind whipped
the frenzied flame, whispered and lifted
vortexes of smoke from its red skin
like the hand of a ghost wrapping
my last words around its fingertips
and sending them, an unspun spiderweb,
through the air until they reached the limit
of the roaring light, thrown into the dancing shadows,
as if they existed, as if the quiet shuddered itself
into the afterlife and through the veil, was still, and rested.

It is hard to remember the future–my dry, chewed lips
tart with the taste of alkaline as I pace across the glass
of a car crashed street full of blurry signs, hours old,
my phone buzzing, full of backwards texts
and a high school buddy’s ringtone, even though
I lost his number in a gambling accident. The beer bottle
in my hand is sharp on my thumb with a cracked neck,
the top twisted off with the chisel of drunken teeth–
but it has been done by those of us
who look back into it, by someone crazy enough to plant
a mirror in the past like their first backyard garden
until, with the limbs of an oak, they grow into the reflection.

It is easier to recall an event when it is over–
the late night kiss you walked home in the rain
under a shared umbrella, the rush of your rollercoaster blood
when hope and fear mixed in the summer sweat
of your long-distance relationship with “I love you,”
the expanding dark of your eyes opening
over the blue-green haze of her flowering iris–

but if you can, you should remember it
as it happens, the recollection of water
(as an image stands from the river)
gathering itself back from her body
with the purpose of gravity rushing headlong
into the ocean of time, dripping from the glow of the sun
on her face, her hands shimmering
from the ripples of her bare feet
as she walks up onto brown rock,
flipping her shades down, smiling, quicksilvered.

And if the future does unfold itself
like a child on a swing, leaning his head back
toward the flying blue cloud of the sky,
into the unseen daylight stars, be gentle with it.
Draw it toward the thunderstorm echo of your heart
and with a whimsical dandelion sigh
send it out on the dragonfly wings of your breath.

Let it go: a bitter mouth will only be fed ashes
like a plate of barbecue wings carved
from the pile of a premature phoenix.
A rabid tongue of fire will lick your wounds
until it gnaws on the unfiltered cigarette of a scar.
Do not hold on to the fingerprint of a hot coal.

Let it go: the time your mother tried to protect you,
ran after you screaming down the driveway
and throwing your phone across the road
while you were joyriding your best friend’s
stepfather mustang to an underground garage party.

Let go. Somewhere in the crystalline fractal
of the past those dead, those tornado, spiraling wisps
of smoke are twisting with us into the future,
reaching the pyramid of their faces up into the space
between us and everything else that exists.

They do not need to be buried, though we will,
like the fading stain of ash on my mother’s blouse
as she flung her father-in-law’s remains
into the rolling mountains of Arkansas.

Memories are not kept the way choices are lost
by thinking about them, but making none.
Only a fool knows that. It is hard to eat smoke,
and when that wall of dust rushes over you,
when you have decided to wash with dirt,
when you see the future cascading from the sky
like a golden portal, liquid with eyes,
then you can remember now, the temple,
as it happens, fiery in its silent stillness, and the rest.